Why didn't they do GC per process like Erlang instead of GC per thread?
I thought processes and sub processes are cheaper to spawn then threads? That's the reason why Chrome tabs are in per sub processes right? Instead of threads?
I thought processes and sub processes are cheaper to spawn then threads? That's the reason why Chrome tabs are in per sub processes right? Instead of threads?
Secondly threads were originally created as a cheaper alternative because spawning processes was too expensive (on Windows). The original reason for Chrome using processes was that processes gives you memory protection. But I don't know how much it really helped them in the end, because they quickly noticed that using one process per tab doesn't scale. Thus Chrome (at least originally) limited the maximum number of processes to ten.
Both Go and Rust - being relatively low level - prefer passing pointers (references) rather than the data itself. This requires a shared GC heap.
No free lunch...
Also process is heavier entity for OS kernel in comparison to thread (address space, file descriptors are all per-process objects, not per-thread, thread is just a unit of processor time scheduling). Chrome tabs are processes for security reasons. Chrome trades speed for security in this context.